A maintenance boat works next to the turbines of the new Burbo Bank off shore wind farm in the mouth of the River Mersey. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

You have to pinch yourself. Three years ago, when my book Heat was published, critics lined up to tell me that the plans it contained were "unfeasible", "unviable", "too expensive" and "politically impossible". Now these ideas, none of which were mine alone – such as a smart grid used to transmit information between appliances and electricity suppliers, offshore energy parks connected to the grid with high-voltage DC cables, universal grants for insulation, a low-carbon heat grid – have become so mainstream that they've been adopted as policy by the Conservative party. The theory of energy provision has changed beyond recognition since 2006. The practice is still stuck in the dark ages.

That the Conservatives, following the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, can outflank Labour so easily on this issue shows how attached the governing party has become to "sunk costs". By this I mean the lobbying power of companies which have already made their investments and want to squeeze every last drop out of them before they expire.

Blair used to talk endlessly of the "knowledge-based economy", but except when he doled out contracts to Labour donors in the pharmaceutical industry, he seemed to be referring to the knowledge of 50 years ago. Labour's expensive attachment to the old economy – internal combustion engines, opencast coal mines, airports and motorways – has been a standing impediment to the new energy technologies now being adopted by the rest of Europe. Listen too closely to business lobbyists and you end up without a business vision.

There are some major gaps in the plans explained by Cameron this afternoon and in the document his party has just published. They reflect his party's continued fetishisation of micro-generation. The Conservatives favour expensive and grossly inefficient systems like rooftop wind turbines and solar panels because its members hate onshore wind farms, which are much cheaper and more efficient. My heart sank when Cameron extolled Germany's decentralised energy revolution: doesn't he know that the half-million solar roofs that country has installed supply only 0.4% of its electricity?

His enthusiasm for domestic combined heat and power (CHP) plants is disappointing for another reason: the likely carbon savings produced by replacing your boiler with a heat and power plant top out at around 15%. This is tiny by comparison to the cuts required, and locks in fossil fuel use for the 20 or 30 years until the machine dies. The only sensible CHP schemes, which the Conservatives also support, are industrial projects big enough to make carbon capture and storage viable.

I'm intrigued by his plans to use biogas to supply 50% of all the heat our homes use. Is this possible? Is there enough of it? I hope so, because he has no other viable plan for decarbonising the domestic heat supply.

The policy document talks of using a Maglev or TGV-type system for a high-speed rail link from the north of the country to the south, but the provisional figures I have seen suggest that their fuel use is similar to that of airliners. The Spanish AVE train might be a better model, but we need to see some hard numbers before deciding whether or not this kind of railway will really cut emissions.

The biggest disappointment in both the document and the interview was the lack of a clear statement on coal-burning power stations. The policy document speaks of the need to "incorporate carbon capture and storage equipment into at least 5,000MW of new coalfired power plants" and "restricting carbon emissions to the level achieved by a modern gas power plant". Cameron said "What we can't have is a Kingsnorth situation, where it goes ahead without even being part of an experiment." What would it have cost the Conservatives to have stated unequivocally that no new coal-burning power stations will be built unless it uses carbon capture and storage from the day it opens?

But there is plenty here that thrills, from grand plans for offshore power production to the micro-engineeering of intelligent load management. This is the white heat of technology that Labour has so woefully neglected. This – though flawed and incomplete – is a vision of the kind that all governments will need if we're to prevent global climate breakdown.